Notes on St. Patrick's Day in Savannah, Georgia, U.S.A.

Most of what you hear about St. Patrick's Day in Savannah is fake news. Google it and you'll read about the parade’s founding in 1813 or 1818 or 1824, because, well, Ye Olde Internet doesn't really know when the first procession was organized by the Hibernian Society of Savannah, an organization (still in existence) established centuries ago “for the purpose of offering aid and assistance to needy Irish immigrants.” I've met zero needy Irish immigrants in Savannah since moving here and must congratulate the Hibernians on a fine job. 

In your quest to learn about the parade they established, you'll invariably be lured into lazy photo essays that claim to present the parade in all its family-friendly fun, featuring face-painted youths in strollers, sunglassed moms in cute green tops, dads grinning with breakfast beers, college kids on spring break mugging for the lens, everybody having a jolly good time. Or maybe you’ll fall into the Reddit cesspool and read up on the louche debauchery of it all, lovers embracing in portable toilets, grown adults urinating on the steps of a historic church, everybody drinking vodka for breakfast and howling at the noonday sun. Bring the kids! 

The thing is, all of this does happen, but that’s not the real parade. The real Savannah St. Patrick’s Day is so much more. You won’t find it in any newspaper or magazine, until now. For I have journeyed into the heart of this verdant darkness. I have seen the glory and braved the toilets. And I have much to report. What I want to tell you is that this parade, with all its attendant rites and rituals, is one of the few miracles I have seen with my own eyes, one of the miracles being how more people don’t die. Some do. More on that in a moment.

* * *

To understand this miracle, we must travel into the past — not two centuries, but only a few years back, when my wife, Lauren, and I first moved here. In those days, we were, like the many who visit and occasionally move to this heavenly city, charmed by the surreal splendor of a place that feels like a high-concept VR experience celebrating the zenith of Enlightenment humanism, all those trees, steeples, museums, pocket gardens, Girl Scouts, SCAD students painting en plein air, an outdoor wedding every few blocks. Too perfect to be real, this beneficent fairy kingdom, all shadow and sunbeam, blossom, and gurgle. 

This grandeur, any tour guide will tell you, is thanks to General James Oglethorpe, M.P., a restless Englishman with progressive Christian ideals who, in 1729, was placed in charge of England's debtors prisons for the warehousing of the kingdom's drunks. Oglethorpe had an idea. Why not ship this rabble just north of Jacksonville to frighten the Spaniards? 

King George II was all about it. And so Oglethorpe squeezed a few lucky souls onto the Anne, and in 1733 weighed anchor in the muddy water off a bluff on the Savannah River, home to the Yamacraw, where his gang of British reprobates disembarked, climbed ashore, and immediately opened an array of competing gift shops.

Oglethorpe soon set about designing the beginnings of the city you see today, a town the Old World would envy. Slavery would be outlawed from the outset, as would lawyers, though sadly these humane prohibitions didn't last. Instead of a grand village green, he laid out an orderly constellation of little squares where everybody, theoretically, had a shot at the good life. Each square — eight at first, then more, two dozen in all — would serve as an English garden for every citizen. Some 22 of the 24 squares remain today. These odd little parks, now flowered into enormous shadow-box dioramas of green, work magic on the soul.  

I know many reading this story will cringe at an idealized vision of a city that was founded on Indigenous lands, or the fact that, nearly 300 years later, nearly a fifth of the city's families fall below the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In Savannah, precious few hardworking folks can afford to live downtown in anything larger than a capacious dumpster. Still, when walking among the squares, these facts fail to dim the city's brilliance. Savannah's the kind of place where you find yourself checking the Zillow app just to see how much it will cost to drag your family from its dead suburban hellscape to this New World paradise where Paula Deen first monetized heart disease. Say what you will about the perils of colonialism, but Savannah feels to me not unlike what God, if you dare believe in such a being, means for a city to be. In the weeks and months after our move, I felt lucky as a leprechaun.

* * *

Problem was, we had no friends. I found a few buddies, sure. We met up briefly for beers before dinner ("Gotta run. Taco night.") and sat in each other's backyards until conversation ran thin ("Gotta run. Early meeting."). What I desperately needed was a people, my people, any people.

Our quiet street, a couple miles from downtown, had all the makings for lasting friendship, but driveway conversation ran to the shallow: SEC football, weather, what kind of gravel is best. Drugs were a frequent topic, Xanax, Vicodin, Valium. Nice people, I guess, medicating their loneliness like the rest of us. Lauren and I tried supper clubs and churches where they made you hug strangers. 

They call Savannah the Hostess City of the South, and that's what it felt like: a party at someone else's house. Supper clubs, book clubs, yacht clubs, garden clubs, gun clubs, golf clubs: Savannah's never not reminding you that you don't belong. The gates of this paradise were narrow. I felt like those tourists endlessly searching for Gump's bench in Chippewa Square, wandering, confused. It's supposed to be right here. But it wasn't. The embrace of community eluded us.

That's when we first decided to give the parade a try, even though, for most of my life, St. Patrick's Day was a forgettable holiday for handsy pervs with a food-coloring fetish, a day lurking on the least interesting page of the calendar. March? What is March? Wake me in May. I don't like being pinched. Who does? But all who live in Savannah must reckon with this parade, and I figured it was time.

"Oh, Lord, don't go," a coworker said. "It's a mass riot."

Stay away, locals said, the argument being that Savannah's St. Patrick's Day was in fact a great green goliath of devastation, befouling everything beloved of the city: radiant foliage trampled, brahmin squares besieged by every honkey within a hundred square miles who owns a lawn chair and a Yeti cooler, cobbled streets swamped with kilted monsters and bewigged harlots, gutters astink with cirrhotic rivers of pollinated vomit, historic façades buried behind an endlessly grotesque palisade of toilets on every boulevard menacing the atmosphere with a malevolent deodorant stench, fragrant with, what is that? Pineapple? A waft of Froot Loop? Breathe in the wonder. The Reddit threads, apparently, weren't entirely wrong.

"Every local leaves town on St. Pat's," was the refrain. "It's apocalyptic."

This annual siege of Savannah, we were warned, was the one day a year when the dormant genes of Oglethorpe's degenerates were reanimated: a proud, historic village overrun by goateed crackers who put on their finest anklets and came downtown looking for something timeless to destroy. 

"Sounds fun," my wife said.

"Let's do it." 

* * *

That next St. Pat's, we dressed our three small children in kelly and headed downtown after breakfast, dragging the kids past hotblooded lovers necking in the shade, schoolteachery types in rainbow wigs drinking mimosas out of watering cans, college boys behaving as if they'd all just been hit in the head with rubber mallets and were thrilled about it. Fights broke out every block, or were those just violent bro-hugs? Yelps and barks echoed through the canopy. The city had become a zoo. Soon, we came upon a square, the human roar falling like a sheet of rain. 

"Is this it?" I asked a man wearing a green diaper.

"Hell if I know," he said.

We broke off from the diapered man and soon beheld a thousand bodies sardined into the far side of the square. Nearer to us, on the grass, lay what appeared to be a dead man.

"This is nice," Lauren said.

"Is this where the parade goes?" I asked.

"Nope," the dead man said, without opening his eyes.

Upon investigation, I discovered that the parade route traveled around the opposite side of the square, every inch already colonized with tents and canopies and buffet tables and string lights and revelers in green. It looked like a hundred outdoor wedding receptions collapsed into a single writhing mass. Day-Glo construction tape of yellow and orange stretched across every available ingress, webs of blockade. We were unwelcome here. Typical Savannah.

I stared into the beautiful fray as men carried pitchers of Bloody Marys above their heads and women threw hot biscuits to the children. I lusted for access to their chocolate fountain. It was like going to Disney World  only to discover, at the very center, fenced off, unapproachable, inaccessible, an even Disney-er World. We dragged the children another few blocks and settled for a slab of sunny sidewalk near a church. Soon enough, the parade came rolling down Bull.

* * *

There were a handful of marching bands, followed by ranks of soldiers, trailed by disordered echelons of Bostonian firepersons, enfeebled Shriners on farting little go-carts, roving herds of men and women and children belonging to this or that society of Hibernian descent. If you saw somebody you knew marching by, you could point at them and go, "Hey, Bill!" And Bill would point back and go, "Hey, you!" Bill wouldn't say your name because Bill couldn't see you because Bill had the blood-alcohol level of a potato famine survivor.

There were motley processions of floats that blasted “Hot Hot Hot” over loudspeakers, with one flatbed toting a worship band from a local church that played rock songs about Jesus while drunken pagans screamed for Skynyrd, and local troupes of dancing children who wore scandalous burlesque costumes and were followed by doting stage moms who smiled and kept their daughters in line with words of encouragement like, "Mind your turnout, Kynleigh!"

The Sons of Confederate Veterans had marshaled a group to march, too, bedraggled old moonshiners with muskets waving the Stars and Bars in hopes of Making America Two Different Countries Again. Some cheered for the gray-trousered rubes, others booed for the racist honkeys to go back to hell. Here was America in all its weird glory, these Lost Cause rebels sandwiched in between an HBCU marching band and a National Guard platoon. Every block or two, the rebels blasted a cannon that made babies cry. 

What hearing we had left was finished off by a series of fife and drum bands featuring bagpipes. I do love "Amazing Grace" played mournfully on the sheep's bladder from a distant heath, but when the pipers are close enough to shatter the last remaining bones of the inner ear, the effect dims. The whole parade blurred by like a convoy of refugees from a Cormac McCarthy novel who'd stumbled onto humankind's last stash of warm beer. 

From where we stood, I could just make out the vision of another square up the street, very much like the previous one, heaving with green bodies in the shade, dancing, drinking, bathing in fountains of chocolate. 

Such is the New World. Somebody always got there first, to force out the people who actually got there first, who had very likely forced even earlier occupants out, all the way back to the Triassic, such that, by the time you arrived, all you got to do was watch from the outside and try not to covet. No wonder locals left town. That's what I wanted to do, too.

"Time to go," I said.

"No, Daddy!" our 4-year-old said, dancing, clapping. "Here comes another band!"

The sun was angry that day as the pack train thundered onward, brass glinting, a marching band of old-timers too old and hypertensive to be promenading in that heat. And then, right in front of the church, an aged horn player just stopped marching and fell over dead. The parade came to a halt until the EMTs hauled the body away. 

Lauren and I vowed never to go back. We spent the next few parades at the beach, like so many other lonely transplants, just us and the kids. Years passed. We considered moving somewhere new, somewhere less old, somewhere that might welcome the lonely immigrants we felt we had become, just like the Irish so long ago.

Then one day, three leprechauns suddenly materialized in my life. 

* * *

Their names were Chip, Soren, and Jimbo. Leprechauns, it is said, can be summoned by wearing green and consuming psilocybin, though what bade these three into my life was the irresistible sound of ice being poured into a cheap cooler. What a welcome relief, to have lived in Savannah for nearly a decade by then, so desperate to find community, only to wake one day and find these rascals on my porch. 

The four of us gathered often to laugh, drink, confess, occasionally weep due to the drink, and play music until we were asked by one of our patient wives to stop, which was often, due to the children, who must, we were told, sleep. 

Jimbo and Chip loved to play "Whiskey in the Jar" on their guitars, this Irish reel crammed with a nonsense chorus ("Whack fall the daddy-o!"). I'd never been much for pub jigs, but all this music, all those porch beers, all this good clean fun, began to reveal rainbows in every sky. It seemed that pots of gold might be here after all. The clover that pushed up through the yard every winter now looked impossibly green. 

"You guys ever do the parade?" Jimbo asked one night. 

He and Chip had grown up in Savannah and gone to the parade as youngsters, though they'd spent many years away. I told them how we'd dragged our children through a drunken mob just to stand on a sidewalk and watch a man die. 

"There's the problem," Chip said. "I don't want a sidewalk. We need a square."

"But how?" I said. It seemed like the squares were always taken.

What would be required of us, Jimbo explained, was great sacrifice, describing a scene that sounded like what William Wallace encountered at the Battle of Stirling Bridge.

"I've never done it," Jimbo said. "But I hear it's pretty intense."

"Which square?" asked Soren.

We pulled up a parade map on our phones and surveyed our options: Chippewa Square, Johnson Square, Reynolds Square. Where should we stake a claim?

"It has to be Lafayette," Chip said. "Right there by the church."

I knew the dappled and paradisiac shade of this square well, had walked through it often in my strolls through the city. There, on one corner, the childhood home of the weirdest monotheist in recent memory, Flannery O'Connor. There, a stone's throw to the right, The Original Pinkie Masters, where they say Jimmy Carter climbed the bar and first declared he would run for the highest office in the land, though one cannot imagine Jimmy Carter climbing anything but a ladder to build someone a home. Two cozy bookstores loiter just beyond, where Flannery's children lurk. And there, towering above you, the twin Gothic spires of the city's spiritual heart: the Cathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist. I had often found myself gaping up at this church in childlike wonder, feeling shame that as a nation, so few of us worship supreme beings who compel perfectly normal people to build such temples in their honor.

"Lafayette is the one," Jimbo said. 

Chip and Jimbo described the mêlée that takes place on Lafayette and other squares at precisely 6:00 a.m. every March 17, which sounded not unlike the climactic scene from Far and Away, the 1992 romcom about a pair of destitute, sensual Irish immigrants played by Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. 

The action of this film builds toward the Land Run of Oklahoma in 1893, when the U.S. government gave away roughly 6 million acres of farmland previously belonging to the Cherokee Tribe to whichever white people got there first. They lined everybody up outside the territory, blasted a shotgun at high noon, and the race was on, in which many people and horses were injured, beloved pets trampled, American dreams realized, and maybe a murder or two happened due to drowning.

Basically, that's what happens on the morning of the parade, it was explained, the only differences being that the shotgun blast happens an hour before dawn, the settlements are temporary, and almost nobody is stabbed.

"We'd have to be down there by 6 in the morning," Chip said.

"Probably earlier," Jimbo said.

"5?" 

"Maybe 4."

"3."

"3?"

Could we do it? It seemed a little ridiculous. We were all romantics deep down, dreamers. The abiding mood of our gatherings was a pining hope, like four enthusiastic fans at a game you know you're probably going to lose. We laughed about our disappointments and spoke of becoming better men, better husbands, better fathers. What we wanted, each of us in his way, was to belong to something. Something forged in fire. Chip poured a little bourbon into his cup.

"Boys, this could change everything," he said.

Within an hour, we'd drawn up a battle plan, the execution of which would, in a very real sense, change our lives forever. I can't speak for my friends, but for me, this plan would be my final attempt to make Savannah home. One last shot before packing up.

It is difficult to conjure in words what happened to me, to all four of us, on that next St. Patrick's Day, except to say that it was a religious experience, if your religion was war and your experience was the Sacking of Constantinople.

* * *

A few weeks later, I stood in my driveway with a bottle of Four Roses, waiting for my friends. It was already 5 a.m. Our first mistake.

The boys came shooting down my street. I hopped in.

"We're already late!" Soren said at the wheel.

"Run these stoplights!" Jimbo said. 

Minutes later we hit Lafayette Square and beheld a horror, the streets already teeming with bodies in the dark, ready for battle. Gratefully, the square itself was empty, save the police officers who patrolled the interior to ensure no cheaters snuck in before go-time, but along the barricades, every inch of land was already earmarked by the careful placement of chairs, coolers, wagons full of food, tents, portable loudspeakers ready to be hurled into the grass. Men stood shoulder to shoulder in green blazers and T-shirts announcing fealty to Outlaw Country and the Salt Life. They carried the rude weapons of the borderlands: hammers, mallets, wooden spits, staves. Several appeared to be wielding what could only be described as home furnishings.

We stood in the street clutching our pitiful dearth of gear. Why had we brought hammers? We had nothing to hammer.

"Did anybody bring stakes?" Chip said.

Ranks closed. To our left crouched a phalanx of green-jacketed soldiers, drooling at an opening in the barricade where a brick sidewalk traverses the square, in order to make a lateral feint at the interior, a plan worthy of Hannibal. Everybody wanted to claim this land for his friends and family. But we could not all fit here, that much was clear.

An engorged lumberjack with no delineation between his face and neck but a thatch of turfy chin hair said, "Looks like you boys done overslept!" 

I don't often feel primeval rage, but in that moment, I wanted to murder this lumberjack and wear his goatee like a hat. 

Jimbo and Chip looked around for a face they might know, and Soren and I took our hammers and tried to stand there in the street like men who might one day end up in a trial involving Exhibit A: bloodsoaked hammers. 

It was now 5:50 a.m., mere moments before the start of bloodshed. Several TV crews were here now. The din swelled. And that's when we met an angel from heaven, who, in one simple gesture of hospitality, changed our fortunes. His name was Roscoff. He looked 300 years old, but was filled with an inner light that made him also seem, somehow, younger than us all. 

"Y'all can have a little spot right here," this man said. He tore away some of his yellow tape to make room for us to assault the very best green of the square.

"Oh man, thank you!" Jimbo said.

"We used to have a big group come out, lots of kids," Roscoff said. He seemed pleased to have company. All four of us shouldered in next to him.

"You really saved our butts," Chip said.

"We thought we'd have to bust some heads," Soren said.

"You might get a chance to," Roscoff said, grinning. He held a hammer. He had killed before. We may yet see him kill again. The screeching pipes of House of Pain's "Jump Around" started up somewhere to our left. 

"Tell me what to do," I said. 

Roscoff said, "Can you scale this barricade?" 

I felt physically capable of scaling little more than a fish, but the bourbon filled me with strange fire. I stared into grass as green as the vales girdling the Rock of Cashel, though for now the land was blacker than the hearts of our enemy over there on the opposite side of the square who shrieked in the darkness, nothing between us but contested land under an unfading canopy planted by God in the days before days.

"Let's get ready!"

"Almost time!"

My guts began to boil, quivering with terrible and holy rage. 

"One minute!" 

I was handed a beer. I shotgunned.

"Thirty seconds!"  

I was handed a bottle of Jameson. I swigged.

"Twenty!"

I was handed a long wooden stake. I gripped it like fabled Durandal, mighty sword of Roland. 

"Ten seconds!" 

"Hold!"

"Hold!"

In the rest of America, it was a quiet Tuesday morning before a cold winter sunrise, but here in Savannah, it felt like Armageddon.

"Here we go," Roscoff said.

"Three!"

"Two!"

"One!"

A whistle shrieked across the rage of morning, and our bodies hurled madly toward death, or something deeper than life. Later footage from the TV cameras showed Soren somersaulting into the darkness over the heads of lesser men while I leapt into the air and hurled the stake like a javelin, bellowing like a madman as others rushed in behind us, only too late, for Soren and I had found one another in the interior of the square and hammered home our stakes. The land was ours.

"Hey, whoa there!" Soren said, as a crew of hollering men tore at our tape.

"This here's been claimed!" I said.

"This is public property!" they said.

A voice from the dark said, "Call the police!"

Soren, an ordained minister, said, "I AM the police!" 

There were insults and elbows and fits thrown and more men hurdling the barricades, but all of us had done our part, and within seconds, the battle was over, the cries of war hammered into the ploughshares of cracking beers and gentler music springing forth from the darkness. Chip produced sacks of biscuits from Clary's. Coffee was drunk, cigarettes smoked, relief sighed. 

Black softened into blue and blue into the ombre of a slow sunrise over the cathedral spires, pouring gray milky light through the canopy. The bells of 7 ding-donged everlasting peace. People appeared, then more, all of humanity, each one greener and gayer than the last. Gay is a good word here. Gay frivolity animated everything. Men who would have filleted one another with pruning shears an hour earlier now stood at the borders of their encampments to discuss the rising cost of orthodonture. The lumberjack two spots over now wore a green feather boa. 

* * *

Two hours later, when the children beheld our spot, they cheered. 

"Wow," Lauren said. "This is great!"

By midmorning, the din of celebration had catapulted itself into the bellow and crack of pipe and snare drum, the marching bands and soldiers and firepersons and dignitaries and dancing troupes clamoring up the street and through the dappled sunlight, no longer a shambling convoy of refugees. The hellish scream of pipers transmuted into a tear-inducing battle cry to the gods. The endless flatbeds of grimacing strangers became a rolling band of angels.

We took it all in, drunk with achievement.

Chip said, "We did it, gentlemen."

Soren said, "I feel like I've finally done something with my life."

"You know," Jimbo said, "we're going to have to do all this again next year."

"Next year? I'm tired just thinking about next week."

Our bones were weary. We observed Roscoff cleaning up.

"What time did you get out here?" Soren asked.

"Three days ago," Roscoff said, walking off to toss his CAUTION tape into the trash. 

"You know, he slept out here," Chip said, in hushed awe.

"Why?"

"To keep out the hardtails."

"Hardtails?" I asked.

Hardtails, it was explained, were interlopers, strivers, hosers, latecomers.

"Like us, you mean?"

"That's why we should sleep out here next year," Soren said. “To keep out people like us."

"It's not a dumb idea," Jimbo said.

"It is," I said. "It's a dumb idea." 

But we had found something we did not want to lose.

"Let's do it," Soren said.

* * *

The next year, we got out there a day early and slept on the sidewalk with Roscoff. The year after that, we got to the square two days early and Roscoff still beat us to it. He makes no claims to sorcery, but we feel he might be a wizard or some other divine being, somewhere between Gandalf and a leprechaun and a man who just really loves sleeping on a sidewalk.

I soon forgot about our plans to move. We had a toehold now, then a foothold, which grew, as did our families over the years, as did our need for more space and more friends to fill it with us, and we enlarged our company: Alec, Andrew, the other Andrew, Ben, Brad, Casey, Eric, Grant, Hampton, Jacob, James, Jason, Jon, Lee, Martin, Matt, Michael, Nick, Robert, Ryan, Sam, Scott, Taylor, and many others who just show up, friends of friends, all are welcome, if they can help. Somewhere in the fracas you will find Soren and Chip and Jimbo and me, acting half our age.

Sometimes, we're sprawled on the grass three or even four days early, if the spirit moves us. I can't quite say why. Maybe it's because we fear losing our claim to hardtails. Maybe it has nothing to do with the parade. Maybe it's because each of us, in his way, has discovered a pot of gold at the end of a long and elusive rainbow. That is what the internet gets wrong about St. Patrick's Day in Savannah. It's not about a parade or a party or midmorning margaritas. It is about a people who've traveled far from home in search of something like the American Dream,  whatever that means to you, and who almost didn't find it, until they found others, like them, needy and impoverished of spirit. Together they found something they desperately needed: not gold, not land, but each other.

We've been out in Lafayette for nearly a decade now. If you're reading this in the days before St. Patrick's Day, chances are we're out there right now. If you happen to be visiting for the parade, like hundreds of thousands do every year, you may stumble across us on the square, waiting for battle. If it is night, you may find us spooning in a huddled mass along the tabby sidewalk adjacent to the square, our frostbitten faces exposed to the elements, praying for warmth. On warmer nights, you may find us sleeping in the cool soft ryegrass of the square itself, though that practice ended the year the sprinklers turned on at two in the morning.

If it happens to be raining, you might spy us playing music in the midst of the storm, baying Irish reels into the canopy, or preparing stew or sodden charcuterie by moonlight, to give ourselves energy for more songs, more laughter, more crouching behind oaks awaiting the next Ghost Tour Trolley, so that we can frighten the tourists, which the tourists seem to believe is part of the tour. If this sounds silly, that’s because it is, and far sillier than you could possibly imagine. But we don't mind being laughed at. It will be us who are laughing during the parade, if we don’t die of exposure in the night.

I love these men, because it's easier to love people you've watched vomit into the hellmouth of a portable toilet at two in the morning while you film it for your friends. Not that you always get so carried away. But you do. You forget to eat. And while our wives and girlfriends steer clear of all this good clean fun in the days before the parade, many have begun to join us for the storming of the square, along with our sons and daughters, grown tall now, who have made this ritual their own, generation to generation, as it should be. 

We are brothers, and together, we are the Finn McCool Fellowship, in homage to the mythic Irish folk hero who, along with the Fianna, his band of forest-dwelling mercenaries known as the Soldiers of Destiny, defended Ireland against, well, something. Wolves? Englishmen? Tuber blight? Legend says that when he was 10 years old, Finn McCool slayed Áillen, the Fire-Breathing Man of the Tuatha Dé Danann. We fight fire-breathing men every year, too, or at least men who seem capable of great gaseous belches, called hardtails. 

Every year, when the weather has turned springish and garlands of pastels suddenly drape across the shrubberies and church bells ding-dong remembered hymns from childhood and pleasant jigs jangle out of every seam in the sidewalk, the city as light and pretty as a paper flower, you will see us and others of our kind out there, forging in fire and rain and cold a community that now, these many years later, feels transcendent and holy. We are a part of one another's lives all year long now. We even started a church together, a real one, which meets every week, as wild and joyful and real as what we first found on Lafayette Square. For us, St. Patrick's Day isn't a day, or a week. It's a whole life. You can live it, too. All you need is:

Three to four longish wooden tomato stakes;
Two rolls of yellow CAUTION tape;
Two vacation days, maybe three, maybe five;
Mallets, lawn chairs, folding tables, beach canopy;
Enough liquor to make you feel like you understand what Vikings were all about;
Friends, preferably large ones; 
Tubs of Bloody Marys, preferably large ones; 
A T-shirt with a slogan that makes you seem capable of violence; 
A green feather boa that makes you seem capable of love; 
And a chocolate fountain, if you have one.

See you at the parade. We'll probably be asleep.

Katherine Sandoz: The Swiss Army Painter

Mom Joke by Harrison Scott Key

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